Adam Blatner

It’s true that writing comes easier to me than many people, but it’s not as easy as it seems. What I write is at times flowing, but I have tendencies to digress (in case you hadn’t noticed), and on re-reading from a new reader’s perspective, I think I would lose part of my audience. So I revise, and this review and re-editing process goes through several reiterations—often 4 – 8 of them. I take stuff out and put it in the accompanying supplementary webpages—that’s a new tool made possible by the internet, yay. So in fact it’s a fair amount of work.

When I look at things I wrote fifteen years ago I am not pleased. I like the basic thrust on the whole, but there’s stuff there that really should have been only for those who wanted more detail. Nowadays I encounter the experience of being told a whole lot more than I’m able to digest and assimilate at one time—“too much information”—or perhaps I haven’t done enough background reading. Some things I might re-read years later and be able to say, “oh, that’s what they mean, I get it now.”

So thinking and re-thinking is a process that takes a degree of balance of humility and confidence, of “this feels important” and “but it’s not presented well.”